This much is certain: The life-size black-and-white stenciled cats cropping up on commercial block walls all over San Pedro are making some people smile.

“I just think it’s adorable and whimsical,” said Barbara Lightner of San Pedro. “It makes me smile when I see it.”

“It’s so cool. We love it,” said Meggan Lamm, pharmacist at the South Shores Pet Clinic adjacent to a center where one of the mysterious cats turned up.

Ah, but the cats make other people see red. Business owners who don’t like them are stuck having to paint over the unwanted images. One online forum heated up this week in a passionate debate about private property vs. public art.

“I love cats,” one poster wrote on the San Pedro group Facebook page. “Doesn’t mean I want someone SPRAY PAINTING ‘ART’ all over my property or anybody else’s property without permission.”

“There is a dividing point between graffiti and art: It’s called ‘permission,’ ” another wrote. “Also known as consent. I doubt that these kitty vandals have the owners’ consent, but if they do … paint on.”

It appears that permission isn’t part of the cat stencil project.

Downtown San Pedro art gallery owner Allyson Vought said she has mixed feelings about the phenomenon.

“I don’t dislike them, they’re kind of cute. Some have collars, some have different color collars,” she said. “Is it public defacement? Yes. Is it public art? Yes. But it’s a heck of a lot better than seeing some idiot’s tag on there. Then again, it’s something that can get out of hand.”

For now, no one seems to know who’s doing it — or why.

Several note that it’s all reminiscent of the work of Banksy, a pseudonym for a famous British street artist who’s well known for his satirical, humorous — and often political — wall art throughout the world.

“Has Banksy become a scary cat lady?” one Facebook poster asked.

“I don’t think there’s necessarily a message, and if there is, I don’t think an in-depth message,” said Bryan Brusick of San Pedro, a registered nurse whose two children love the black-and-white cats they see all over town.

“Bansky has probably some of the most creative artwork I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I think it’s something similar to that. I know there are quite a few artists who don’t necessarily spend the money to have their artwork put up in galleries so this way they can reach the public eye.”

The “Mysterious San Pedro Cat” figures, as one resident refers to them, began appearing a few months ago. Some have been painted over but others keep popping up — in alleys, on drive-through restaurant perimeters and on retaining walls around shopping centers, parks, and streets.

It’s fast becoming like the game of finding the “Hidden Mickeys” at Disneyland as residents post lists of where they’ve spotted the latest tuxedo kitties around town.

Placed at ground level, they can look so real from a distance that observers think they “see” a real cat sitting or walking along the sidewalk.

Theresa Sardisco noticed them for the first time a few days ago when a friend started pointing them out to her.

One sits on the perimeter block wall of the Western Avenue shopping center that Sardisco’s family Italian restaurant shares with Smart & Final and several other businesses.

Now, she said, she’s seeing the cats everywhere.

“They’re all over the place,” Sardisco said. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s interesting to see. It’s better than seeing graffiti.”

Brusick spotted his first cat several months ago, stenciled on a retaining wall on the road that leads from Ninth Street to Bogdanovich Park.

Another — depicting just a cat face but apparently the work of the same artist — is on a wall at the shopping center at 25th Street and Western Avenue.

Since then, the cats have multiplied, popping up in virtually every corner of the port town, from the historic downtown shopping district near the waterfront to the Western Avenue corridor.

“Every place I’ve seen them, they don’t look like they’re in a spot where they’d harm anyone’s business,” Brusick said.

His 7-year-old daughter, he said, “thinks they’re great.”

As for the complaints, Brusick said there are too many other things to worry about in San Pedro.

“Maybe people need to start taking up the issues of the halfway houses in San Pedro or how easy it is to get drugs or how there are shootings in the street in broad daylight,” he said. “A kitty placed on a wall brings a smile to my children’s faces.”

Donna Littlejohn has covered the Harbor Area as a reporter since 1981. Along with development, politics, coyotes, battleships and crime, she writes features that have spotlighted an array of topics, from an alligator on the loose in a city park to the modern-day cowboys who own the trails on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. She loves border collies and Aussie dogs, cats, early California Craftsman architecture and most surviving old stuff. She imagines the 1970s redevelopment sweep that leveled so much of San Pedro's historic waterfront district as very sad.

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